(Lake Huron) being discovered before the lakes to the south--the first
after the boy Etienne Brule and Friar Le Caron: the latter having gone
before him, celebrated the first mass on Champlain's arrival the 12th of
August, 1615, a day "marked with white in the friar's calendar," and
deserving to be marked with red in the calendar of the west.

There follow twenty restless years in which Champlain's efforts are
divided between discovery and strengthening the little colony, and his
occupations between holding his Indian allies who lived along the northern
pathway to the west, fighting their enemies to the south, the Iroquois,
restraining the jealousies of merchants and priests, trade and missions,
reconciling Catholics and Huguenots, going nearly every year to France in
the interests of the colony, building and repairing, yielding for a time
to the overpowering ships of the English. The grizzled soldier and
explorer, restored and commissioned anew under the fostering and firm
support of Richelieu, struggled to the very end of his life to make the
feeble colony, which eighteen years after its founding "could scarcely be
said to exist but in the founder's brain," not chiefly an agricultural
settlement but a spiritual centre from which the interior was to be
explored and the savage hordes won--at the same time to heaven and to
France--subdued not by being crushed but by being civilized, not by the
sword but by the cross. It was a far different colony that was beginning
to grow fronting the harbor of Plymouth, where men quite as intolerant of
priests as Richelieu was intolerant of Huguenots were building homes and
making firesides in enjoyment of religious and political freedom.

Champlain lay dying as the year 1635 went out, asking more help from his
patron Richelieu, but his great task had been accomplished. The St.
Lawrence had been opened, the first two of the Great Lakes had been
reached, and explorer and priest were already on the edge of that farther